Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 1: pp. 1-74)

Cover of the Melville House edition 

(2016) [a]

 

 

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical [b].

 

I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.  

 

And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as sodomitical parenthood - I don't really care about [d]).  

 

 

I. 

 

Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e]. 

 

It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.

However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].

 

 

II.

Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10]. 

 

And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].

 

 

III.

 

This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.   

 

IV. 

  

This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's): 

 

"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]

 

In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?

 

There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality. 

 

 

V.

 

I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31]. 

 

And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]

 

And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson, who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish. 

 

 

VI.

 

This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37]. 

 

The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.     

 

 

VII.

 

"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]

 

This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e., that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.

 

But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.  

So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.

VIII.

 

I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.

 

For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].

 

(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)  

IX.

Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it? 

 

I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do. 

 

Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].

 

But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.         

 

X.

On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h]. 

Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]  

 

Notes 

 

[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.  

 

[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.   

[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here. 

[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter. 

 

[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this. 

      What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here. 

      See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.

 

[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35]. 

      On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways. 

      But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].

 

[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here. 

Before heading to part two of this post - which can be accessed here -  readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here. 

Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here.